So here’s my question of the day. We have two dominant Little Brown Bird types here – house finches and house sparrows. At home yesterday, I had only finches in backyard. At work, the crowd by the lunch tables is entirely sparrows. What’s different about the two ecosystems? (Note that I don’t expect actual answers.)
Kurt Zenz House lays out the reasons to both laud France’s insight 30 years ago to go nuclear, as well as be concerned: So today, France looks rather smart. It acted decisively in the 1970s to limit its dependence on fossil fuels, and now it’s better positioned than any other non-oil-exporting power to deal with …
Written originally elsewhere, elaborated here. A new study by a California team looks at the effect of the warming of the Indian Ocean, which seems to be anthropogenic in origin, and how that influences precipitation in Africa. It decreases it. People go hungry as a result: We present analyses suggesting that warming in the central …
Just playing with a chart from a Google spreadsheet. Data source: EIA
Larry Rohter had a story in the New York Times over the weekend that began to answer one of the questions I’ve had about the embedded energy costs in the things we buy: The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in …
Continue reading ‘Global Supply Chains Hit by High Energy Costs’ »
A remarkable graph from the latest International Energy Agency Oil Market Report: The purple line is total monthly vehicle miles travelled in the United States. The blue is percentage change year-over-year.
China is big coal, but also big green, according to Bloomberg: China is already the world’s largest renewable-energy producer as measured by installed generating capacity, according to a report today from the Climate Group, a coalition of companies and governments that support solutions to global warming. The country is also the world’s top manufacturer of …
Joel Gay gives Albuquerque water rates a good, hard look: “You hit ’em where it hurts — in the wallet,” said Armando Ortega, customer service manager in Alamogordo, which has among the highest water rates in the state. Since adopting a conservation-oriented rate structure in 2003, Alamogordo’s water use has dropped by 40 percent, he …
Great video by Mark Betancourt on the threat to the deserts of Southern Arizona posed by invasive buffelgrass: more info
The giant novelty item to end all giant novelty items: by Florentijn Hofman h/t Kittrick